Awareness is vital. If you can’t pick up on the things going on around you, you’ll almost certainly never be phenomenal at anything.
Curiosity isn’t far behind. You can be aware of everything at all times, but if you’re not curious enough to investigate, to see how things work and how they fit together, that awareness isn’t going to do you a great deal of good. It’ll be damn near impossible to ever create something useful.
Somewhere in between, I think, is perseverance. The will to keep going when you really want to give up. A lot of people are aware and curious enough to create something useful, sometimes spectacularly useful. The beauty of business is that you only have to be right once. What they don’t tell you is that you may spend a lifetime convincing everyone that you were right that one time. Far fewer people put in that effort to see it to the end. But they’re the people who reap all the rewards.
Most people, even people with superior ideas and skills and talents, give up. Stick around any business long enough and you’ll see competitors, strong competitors with good products, just fade out. Their founders get tired or bored. You’ll see stars, huge bright stars, burn out. They don’t have the ability or the guts to pivot when they should have. And then you’ll see one guy at the back of the pack, who keeps grinding it out. Maybe he never gets to the front, maybe he has a product that’s not quite as good as the best of the field, maybe he’s not as bright, maybe he’s got a host of other setbacks, but his perseverance lets him create a great life for himself.
The best part is, anyone can persevere. It’s not some innate gift. A large part of it is being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. If you can see the goal, if you have some idea of where you’re going and some semblance of how you’re going to get there, the low points are far more bearable.
So, pick an idea where the goal is defined enough to focus on. Put that goal up on your bulletin board, metaphoric or otherwise. It’s ok to hate the process at times, to want to quit, to ache and suffer. You’ll get through it if you have a goal to focus on. And, before you know it, you’ll need a new goal. That’s a great thing to need.
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